The Healing Forests

Looking At The World Through The Eyes Of Shamans, A Scientist Discovers Some Clues

March 15, 1994|By Lynn Van Matre, Tribune Staff Writer.

The doctor was the most frightening-looking person the patient had ever seen. Short and muscular, with piercing black eyes set deep in a chiseled face and glossy black hair hanging past his shoulders, he exuded a palpable aura of power partly physical, partly metaphysical. Word was that he knew his white magic and his black magic, and practiced medicine somewhere in between.

The patient, a Harvard-educated ethnobotanist named Mark J. Plotkin, lay in a palm leaf hut in Suriname's Amazon rain forest as the Wayana Indian medicine man puffed on a pipe filled with healing herbs. As the hut filled with smoke, the shaman applied a mixture of jungle plants to his patient's ailing left elbow. Medical specialists at Harvard and Yale had tried unsuccessfully to cure Plotkin's chronic tendinitis with a variety of methods, including cortisone injections that made the pain worse.

Now, at Plotkin's request, the Wayana witch doctor was taking a crack at the case.

"After he rubbed the plants on my elbow, he began chanting," recalls Plotkin, 38, who has spent the last 15 years traveling between his home base of Washington, D.C., and the jungles of South America, searching for new medicines in the Amazon rain forest. "One wall of the hut started waving, and I heard sounds of rushing wind; it was explained to me later that the spirits were coming down from heaven. Then I had this weird sensation of floating over my body, looking down.

"When I described the experience later to a physician friend of mine, he said, `How can you believe that new age nonsense?' But the fact is that my elbow stopped hurting. That was 10 years ago, and it hasn't bothered me since."

Maybe it was the healing herbs; maybe it was the spirits. Some might say it was the placebo effect. Plotkin, who chronicled his encounters with Amazon tribal healers-variously known as shamans, medicine men and witch doctors-in the recently published "Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice" (Viking), doesn't worry about coming up with a scientific explanation.

"I don't care what did it," says Plotkin, who was in Chicago recently. "Western medicine didn't help; the shaman's system cured me.

"I'm not saying we should close down pharmacies and hospitals. I'm just saying that we shouldn't be so quick to pooh-pooh other systems of healing."

The spirits may still get short shrift from mainstream Western medicine. But these days, rain forest pharmaceuticals are coming on strong, thanks in part to Plotkin's conviction that plants known to native healers may hold the key to tomorrow's cures. In recent years, industry giants such as Merck and Eli Lilly have entered into research agreements with Shaman Pharmaceuticals, the California-based company Plotkin helped found in 1987.

Merck's agreement with Shaman calls for the company to provide extracts of medicinal plants purportedly useful as analgesics or in the treatment of diabetes; Eli Lilly is especially interested in anti-fungal flora.

The use of plants in the treatment of illness is nothing new, though Shaman's back-to-the-jungle approach may be unique in its reliance on native knowledge. That over-the-counter favorite, aspirin, is based on compounds derived originally from willow bark; a quarter of all prescription drugs available today come from plants.

"A lot of people may think that pharmaceutical companies haven't been interested in natural products in the past, but we have been screening them for a long time," points out Merck's Lynn Caporale.

"One of the key problems with plant-derived drugs, though, is that you can't always go back and get that same plant again," Caporale says. "Now, because of advancements in chemistry, we have developed more rapid and sensitive screening methods so that we can identify a plant's active molecule more quickly and make more use of each sample."

In the case of rain-forest flora, securing more samples of a valuable medicinal plant may be impossible.

The Healing Forest Conservancy, a non-profit conservation organization established by Shaman Pharmaceuticals, estimates that fewer than 5 percent of tropical plant species have been thoroughly examined. But every year, hundreds of rain-forest plant and animal species become extinct, their potential lost forever.

Clearly, it's an opportune time for a revival of interest in medicinal plants, with the Amazon rain forest the final frontier. But one thing sets Shaman apart from other pharmaceutical firms that might be hopping on the back-to-the-jungle bandwagon: the fervent faith that Plotkin and his colleagues place in the folk wisdom of indigenous peoples.

Unlike many other Western scientists, Plotkin is willing to remain open to traditional healing methods that rely on nature and tribal spirits as much as on medicinal plant compounds.